It is amazing that we still have to defend the importance of literature in education. Do you know a great personality who stood out for his intelligence and wisdom and who did not read or praise reading? Can one have an awake and sensitive gaze on the world and on beings without reading?
Admittedly, there have been good people, in history and even today, who did not read, but it was most of the time because they were unable to access the letters and not a deliberate choice. “One can live without philosophy, without music, without joy and without love, wrote the philosopher Jankélévitch. But not so well. »
The same applies to literature as well. We can live without it, but it would be foolish not to recognize that it improves everything, in all areas. Therefore, not teaching it to as many people as possible for as long as possible would be a pedagogical error.
It may be said that I have a conflict of interest in defending the place of literature at school and in CEGEP because I have taught this subject all my life. We will be wrong. I don’t defend literature because I teach it; I decided to teach it because I love it and it has nourished my life since I learned to read.
Those who believe, for example, that science students could be excused from literature classes should read Einstein. “It is not enough to teach a man a specialty, writes the latter in how i see the world (Flammarion, 2017), written in the 1930s. Because he thus becomes a usable machine, but not a personality. It is important that he acquire a feeling, a practical sense of what is worth undertaking, of what is beautiful, of what is morally right. And this, added the physicist, is the essential role of the humanities, particularly of philosophy, history, art and literature.
In 2010, the American biochemist Gregory A. Petsko went in the same direction and protested against the closure, at the State University of New York, of departments linked to the humanities. The essayist Réjean Bergeron reports his words in I want to be a slave! (Bush poets, 2016). “Of all the courses I took in college and university,” writes Petsko, “the ones I have benefited most from in my career as a scientist are courses in classical studies, art history, in sociology and English literature. These courses not only gave me the opportunity to better appreciate my own culture, they taught me to think, analyze and write clearly and correctly. Not one of my science classes did that. »
similar words, beyond the books (Poètes de brousse, 2023, 248 pages) is full of them. Saying he was “convinced that we can learn a lot from literature”, Normand Baillargeon, director of this collective work, asked a dozen people working in various professions with no immediate link to literature “what they learned from it and what which has been useful, enlightening and important to them”.
Among the most convincing answers, I retain first that of the psychologist Rachida Azdouz, who deplores the fact that her discipline is too often associated with commercial works of popular psychology, whereas it is the inspiration of great literature that founds it. . The psychoanalysis of Freud and Jung, for example, owes much of its theoretical framework to classical Greek literature.
Azdouz says his interest in psychology came from his teenage readings of Camus, Sartre and Kafka. Today, characters from Dostoyevsky come to his aid in his work. To overcome her difficulties in showing clinical empathy with some of her patients – abusive parents – she says she draws inspiration from the torments of Raskolnikov, the main character of Crime and Punishment. “Reading, she insists, frees the mind. »
The psychiatrist and poet Ouanessa Younsi, in the same spirit, says she needs the novel so much Borderlineby Marie-Sissi Labrèche, that Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to understand borderline personality disorder.
In the most substantial text of this collection, lawyer Julie Latour makes a fiery plea for literature. She chose the law, she says, to “work for a more just society”, and literature, in this mission, is her guide to “understand the human being, in his relationship to himself and to the world”.
A great reader, Latour concludes her reflection with a powerful formula that should be inscribed on the front of all educational institutions: “Reading is not an activity separate from life; she is […] life itself. We can live without, but not so well.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.